Not everyone wants to be a hardcore developer. Writing truly engaging content is an underrated talent and you shouldn't be required to learn all the intricacies of modern web frameworks just to produce awesome pages. In the past, the best you could have done would be to write content in your editor of choice, export it into markdown and then hope that some developer somewhere can incorporate it and add the styles, buttons, images and other visual features which are required to make content transformational, rather than just more boring information.

This site changes all that.

Before we show you exactly how it does so, let's speak briefly about what kind of content will contribute continued meaning to the Kernel community.

Most importantly, we don't want to tell you how to write, because we value unique, diverse and dissenting voices. We don't want to tell you what to write about, because we know that we each have our own blindspots and that your perspective can help us all see something which would otherwise remain invisible.

We do want you to bring your whole self to whatever you contribute and write honestly, sincerely, and with heart. We want you to write without fear or favour, from that place which is primarily concerned about the truth as it is unfolding in you, right now. We want you to take care, both of yourself and with whatever you create, because if you really care about it, so will we.

We also want you to take your time. The specific intention of much of the content on this website is to be long-lived. We did not write highly specialised technical guides precisely because these become outdated within a few months, given the speed of innovation in our industry. Kernel is meant as a home for evergreen content, which means writing which comes from the heart and so goes to the heart of the topic being discussed. This is why we write about perennial human concerns like trust, meaning, value, intention, conversation and listening.

We want you to drill down into the core of what you work on and tell us about it's essence and inner meaning, rather than the specific and transient form in which it appears. This doesn't mean that you should shy away from specifics, but rather that you ought to try and constantly use the specifics of your work and experience to highlight the essential meaning of why you do what you do.

That said, there are some basics we'd appreciate you sticking to as a part of the point about care above.